We have seen a lot of limited-run motorcycles here at Asphalt & Rubber — some have been intriguing, and some have been…well, not. With exclusivity of course comes a price tag of sizable proportions, but it is rare that we see a motorcycle break into six-figures, let alone pass the quarter-million dollar mark. But here we are with the Yacouba Feline. We have featured the work of Yacouba Galle before, as the French designer has done a bit of work in the industry, including a bolt-on design kit for the MV Agusta Brutale, which he calls the Bestiale (a name that might make Anglophones cringe a little). Unlike the Bestiale though, the Feline is a full-on motorcycle, not just a kit…and if you like what you see, it is going to cost you a mint.

The long-winded “Yamaha France GMT 94 Michelin Racing” team is ready for FIM Endurance World Championship action this year, especially with the all-new 2015 Yamaha YZF-R1 motorcycle. The new R1 offers state-of-the-art electronics, as well as near-200hp from its crossplane four-cylinder engine, and the French team is looking to capitalize on those improvements in the EWC for 2015. Yamaha France took the 2014 title in a convincing fashion, so it will be interesting to see what riders David Checa, Kenny Foray, and Mathieu Gines can accomplish with their new toy. We’ve got a bevy of high-resolution photos for you, after the jump.

As promised, here is the second part of our trip down to Fontana, California to meet with MV Agusta USA, go over the company’s new business plan for not only America, but also worldwide, and to ride the current crop of their 2015 machinery. I should preface right out of the gate that this is not a review in regards as to what you’ve come to expect from Asphalt & Rubber. I am not-so-cleverly calling this a “not-a-review” assessment of MV Agusta’s 2015 models. I say this because we had a very limited amount of time on each bike, as there was roughly 10 machines to divide our attention amongst. Think of this article as not far from someone test riding a bunch of motorcycles at a dealership, with similar duration and limits put in place…except that this someone rides motorcycles for a living.

Anyone watching the presentation of Ducati’s 2015 MotoGP bike will have learned two Italian phrases: “Emozionante” and “tanto lavoro”. Both were extremely apt. Getting from where Ducati was to where it is now with the Desmosedici GP15 had needed “tanto lavoro”, a lot of hard work, and they still have “tanto lavoro” ahead of them. The results were “emozionante”, a fantastic word nearer to exciting than emotional. But both exciting and emotional were apt phrases. The sense of eagerness was palpable among Ducati staff at Bologna on Monday. For good reason, the GP15 presented in a long, loud, and rather meandering show is radically different from what came before.

MV Agusta USA recently invited a slew of journalists down to Fontana, California in order to talk about the company’s new business plan, and to ride its current lineup of motorcycles on the infield course. This article is “Part 1″ of that experience, as I wanted to separate my thoughts on MV Agusta, MV Agusta USA, and the general motorcycling climate into one story, and then have my “not-a-review” of the machines for another article. Got it? Ok, let’s go. It is probably easiest to start with where MV Agusta is as a company. MV Agusta has a started a new three-year business plan, which sees the company pushing into a full-range of motorcycles, pushing outside of its Italian boundaries, and pushing out of the “luxury” brand segment.

The Ducati Desmosedici GP15 is a machine that has been long in the making. It represents Gigi Dall’Igna’s next step forward for the wayward Ducati Corse MotoGP team, and it is the dubious honor of holding the hopes of Ducati fans around the world, who see the machine as the silver bullet that will return Ducati to the forefront of racing prowess — no pressure. The most obvious change that can be seen on the GP15 is the re-routing of the exhaust, with the undertail pipes collecting on the right-hand side of the machine, rather than coming in from both sides and meeting in the middle. Can you spot any other changes in the high-resolution photos after the jump? Let us know in the comments.

If anyone needed any further proof that Indonesia is important to the Japanese motorcycle manufacturers, the fact the Repsol Honda team chose Bali as the location to launch their 2015 MotoGP project should remove any doubt. But if Indonesia is so important to the manufacturers, and to MotoGP, why is there not a race there? Over the course of the MotoGP test at Sepang, I had a few conversations with people on the subject. On the record, the story was always the same: we need a suitable track, and as soon as one exists we will be happy to go there. Off the record, however, they were much less optimistic.

Industrial design is not a commonly known, much less well understood, profession. To some it suggests arranging equipment inside factories, to others it means some kind of product engineering. In reality it is the search for, and expression of, human satisfaction in inanimate objects that are mass produced. That’s quite a mouthful, and to the average person it may sound like jiberish written for some pretentious coffee table book, but it is the truth. At least, it is one version of the truth as seen by the GK Design Group of Tokyo, Japan. If you ride motorcycles, then you are intimately familiar with the work of this large and internationally respected studio. Since only its second production bike, the indigenously designed YA-1, every Yamaha motorcycle since 1958 has been crafted by GK.

What look to be official photos of the MV Agusta F4 RC have leaked out onto the internet, along with a slide from MV Agusta’s media presentation on the machine. The photos give us our first glimpse into Varese’s homologation special, complete with a special two-can exhaust by Termignoni. The leaked slide confirms some of the numbers being thrown around about the F4 RC, namely that it will have 212hp, 81.86 lbs•ft of torque, weigh 175kg dry, and cost €36,900 (we already know that the MV Agusta F4 RC will cost $46,000 in the USA). Information from a leaked slide last year has already told us that MV Agusta has radically overhauled the F4 RC’s engine, designing a new cylinder heard, new crankshaft, new camshaft, as well as adding bigger fuel injectors, lighter pistons, and titanium connecting rods.

Mainstream news is mourning the death of Kenji Ekuan today, as the 85-year-old Japanese industrial designer is one of the most influential artists in Japan’s modern era, and is most well-known for his designing of the iconic Kikkoman soy sauce bottle. Ekuan’s lesser-known works though include a number of motorcycle designs for Yamaha, including the now 30-year-old Yamaha VMAX motorcycle, which makes his passing even more meaningful to motorcyclists around the world. Kenji Ekuan founded GK Industrial Design after WWII, and his company helped shape the way Japan rebuilt itself after the world war.

After a week of watching Netflix with our loved ones, Asphalt & Rubber is finally back to the moto-news grind. If you’re anything like us, your egg is still a bit nogged, your pants don’t fit nearly as well as your pajamas did, and Monday came like the Queen of the Harpies to torment your soul in damnation. For those of you still on holiday, we hate / secretly envy you.

That’s ok though…we can do this. But, to get back into the spirit of things, here is something a little light-hearted: an epic parody, of Jean Claude Van Damme’s epic split. We have nothing but tremendous respect for JCVD and his magical inseam, but we have to give these bros some credit for their feat as well.

After all, this might end up being the one time that you want your friends to see you riding a scooter.

The rumors about a Ducati Scooter for the next model year are hitting the internet hard lately, and that is perhaps unsurprising. Ducati’s sales stalled in the third quarter of this year, and the Italian motorcycle company at this point in time is simply trying to finish 2013 on par with its 2012 success.

There is also the fact that Audi AG now owns Ducati Motor Holding, and would like to see the ~44,000 unit company bump its figures into the six-figure territory, and help its German owner take a certain Bavarian brand head-on in the two and four-wheeled industries.

Scooters aren’t really our thing here at Asphalt & Rubber — I mean sure they’re fun to ride, just as long as no one sees you on one, right? That’s the joke at least, but the reality is that the more people we gett on two-wheels in America, the better; and today’s maxi-scooters are essentially just really comfortable motorbikes anyways.

That’s what makes the 2014 Kawasaki J300 such a big announcement at the 2013 EICMA show, as Kawasaki is finally offering a scooter built for the European market, and is now offering its first maxi-scooter.

Yamaha Motor Co. recently had its investors meeting, and the Japanese company left a curious item for its second-to-last slide in the presentation: a leaning multi-wheeler. Unfortunately, the proposed machine doesn’t appear to be a production version of the Tesseract concept (shown above), but instead a new sporty three-wheeled scooter, to take on bikes like the unfortunately named Piaggio MP3.

Expected for the 2014 model year, we should see the Yamaha’s Leaning Multi-Wheeler (LMW) at the EICMA and Tokyo Motor Show later this year. No word yet on what will be beneath the fairings, but it is expected that the leaning trike will around 300cc to 400cc in displacement, and go head-to-head with the MP3 on price (insert 99¢ download joke here).

Not soon after KTM CEO Stefan Pierer dismissed the viability of electric motorcycles, and told Italian journalists that the Austrian company was scrapping its plans to build an electric dirt bike, the KTM Freeride E, KTM has announced the KTM E-Speed electric scooter study, with Pierer even making the bold statement that “we at KTM are completely convinced of electric mobility as a perfect complement to conventional powertrains.”

Debuting the machine at the Tokyo Motor Show, KTM has appropriately recycled the same battery and motor technologies from the Freeride E concept, and put them in the unimaginatively named E-Speed scooter. Using a liquid cooled 14.75 hp / 26.5 lbs•ft motor, KTM has opted for a larger 4.36 kWh battery pack for its metro-targeting scoot.

It is no easy feat in picking the very “best” from a wide array of motorcycles, like we have to do here with the 2012 EICMA motorcycle show in Milan, Italy. How do you compare an adventure-touring bike to a sport bike, and then declare one better than the other? As you can imagine, the comparison is very much an exercise in measuring apples to oranges.

If our metric of choice was simply based on how much buzz was generated here on Asphalt & Rubber, and on the various social media networks as a whole, then the clear winner would be the KTM 1290 Super Duke R Prototype. With a bored-out RC8 R motor that makes 180hp, the KTM surely performs as good as it look, and it looks quite delectable indeed.

Maybe the best bike of the show should go to the now water-cooled Ducati Hypermotard, or its touring variant the Ducati Hyperstrada. Doing away with the air-cooled DesmoDue design of Pierre Terblanche, the 2013 Hypers are a new chapter for Ducati, and just further proof that there are no sacred cows in the Borgo Panigale factory. Speaking of Panigales, we also have to consider the Ducati 1199 Panigale R, of course if that conversation is to occur, then we have to also include the Aprilia RSV4 Factory ABS.

You see it is no easy feat to pick the “Best in Show” at EICMA, and in even our short thought-process above, there are names that are glaringly omitted. What makes the process possible however is when a new model comes along, and clearly outshines everything else — such is the case with the Vespa 946.

What happens when you give Southern Californian bike builder Roland Sands few instructions beyond “build something cool”? and a 2012 Yamaha Tmax 530? You get one of the most pimped out Tmax scooters ever seen…and that is saying a lot. A popular choice with bike tuners and builders in both Europe and Japan, the Yamaha Tmax 530 hasn’t caught on here in the “scooters are for girls” United States of America.

Based around a 46hp 530cc parallel-twin motor, the Tmax 530 has some pep underneath its feet-forward design. Disguised as docile scooter, the Yamaha Tmax is no stranger to shedding its clothes for some performance persusasion, and Roland Sands has tapped into that vein of the Tmax here with his build, which will debut at EICMA tomorrow.

A “hypermodified” 2012 Yamaha Tmax 530, Sands has his usual touches in the machine, which is both a tasteful and raw representation of the looming scooter apocalypse. If Mad Max rode a scooter, this might be it. We love the tan leather seat with its subtle beige stitching, and of course the “braaaaaap” of the baffle-less exhaust. More photos after the jump.

If you want some more proof that Honda’s emerging larger and more “torqueful” two-wheeler, which is based on the Mid Series, is going to be one-part scooter and one-part motorcycle, then look no further than this screen capture of the slide Honda CEO Takanobu Ito used at the company’s end of the fiscal-year event.

While only a very vague sketch of sweeping lines, the image shows a shape that looks striking similar to the Honda DN-01 crossover, which also featured a scooter/motorcycle hybrid design. While Ito-san only talked about the machine in generalities, we do know that Honda’s new motorcycle will be suitable for commuting and touring, built in Honda’s flagship Kumamoto plant, and debut in the North American market.

I am actually surprised this idea took this long to come to fruition, but someone has finally built a “Zipcar for scooters” business. For those not familiar with the idea, Scoot promises to offer urban commuters convenient access to its network of electric scooters that it has parked around in major metropolitan areas. From what we can gather, the idea is that members of the Scoot community pay a monthly fee to have access to these scooters (in addition to the hourly-usage rate), and can use the Scoot scooters around to run errands in cities like San Francisco.

According to Autocar, Audi is in the process of developing a two-wheeled vehicle, either a scooter or motorcycle, which is interesting news considering the recency of the company’s purchase of Ducati. Promised not to be a Ducati with an Audi badge, there are not many other details about the news, though intelligent conjecture would imagine the project is along the same vein as the BMW C600 scooter.

Automakers are currently obsessed with the “last mile” concept of people transportation, which foresees ultra-small cars, scooters, and other two-wheeled vehicles doing the bulk of urban transportation in the coming future.